1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a medical image management system and a medical image management method. The present invention particularly relates to a medical image management system and a medical image management method that can add indices to the recorded medical movies according to the physiological data of a surgeon who performs medical treatment on a patient.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, movies of a surgery are captured by surgical cameras such as endoscopes and microscopes for ophthalmic surgeries. The in-vivo images are displayed on a screen of an output device while recorded in a recording medium as movie information. The movie of the medical treatment (medical movie) is recorded and saved for helping to recall important events during a surgery more vividly and accurately than other events among many surgical records.
Recently, a device capable of capturing still-image information (still image) from the recorded movie information (movie) during a surgery has been developed. When an event of high importance occurs, a person who performs medical treatment captures still images by operating some recording device.
The invention disclosed in Japanese Publication No. 2002-58641 includes a foot switch to be used for a surgeon to efficiently capture still images during a surgery. The surgeons can easily and efficiently capture the still images during their surgery by operating the foot switch with their foot.
The above-mentioned invention enables a surgeon to sample still images without any interruption during a surgery because they can capture desired still images by using the foot switch.
While the foot switch enables the surgeon to capture the desired still-images, if the surgeon forgets to operate the foot switch, the images cannot be obtained. Moreover, unless the surgeon decides to capture still images, nothing will be obtained.
The above-mentioned device for capturing still images depends on the surgeon's will whether to capture still images. However, the surgeon concentrating his attention to a surgery tends to forget to operate a footswitch or the like to capture still images.
The conventional imaging devices are not helpful in knowing how surgeons react to a specific situation.
Particularly, it is difficult to direct his attention to capturing still images with the conventional method while performing medical treatment, especially during such a stressful event that it causes changes in the physiological data of the surgeon.
It is also significantly difficult to tell stressful situations for an inexperienced surgeon. It is also difficult to tell what medical event makes him confused. Thus, he does not understand what stressful situation he will meet in a surgery room until he is involved in actual medical treatment.
Considering the above, there has been a need for a medical image management system configured to capture still images not depending on the surgeon's will but on the surgeons' physiological data corresponding to his stress level.
Furthermore, when the physiological conditions of the surgeons are measured, the resultant physiological data usually has non-linear changes rather than linear-changes in chronological order. Therefore, it is difficult to use the physiological data to make an accurate decision about when the surgeons become nervous.
The present invention relates to a medical image management system and a medical image management method that are capable of adding indices to a recorded medical movie according to the changes in the physiological data of a person who performs medical treatment.